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Yes, the user types less but they have to think more. Don't get me wrong, I love RPN and I've had a stream of HP calculators through my college years (syntheti
by hota_mazi 6y ago
Yes, the user types less but they have to think more.
Don't get me wrong, I love RPN and I've had a stream of HP calculators through my college years (synthetic programming on the HP41!), but... they come at a cognitive price. When you see an expression, you have to process the precedence in your mind to find out the most nested expression and start entering from there.
Basically, the calculator is cheating by forcing you to do some of its job.
- hpfr 6y agoThat’s the point. This precedence processing should be intuitive if you’ve learned to do calculations by hand, and it helps you understand the expression as you enter it which makes for easier error detection. It’s also nicer for building up an expression on the fly as opposed to the Answer key on standard calculators. If you’re just copying existing expressions, you might as well use one of those OCR calculators.
- hota_mazi 6y agoThe point is not really whether it's intuitive or not (and for very nested expression, it's really not always intuitive to find the most nested one, especially if you have to remember precedence laws). The point is that it takes time. As much of an RPN fan I am, I am not convinced that the time it takes my brain to identify nested expressions is smaller than the time it would take me to just type the expression left to right on a regular calculator.